Three Up!: Pennsyl-PAIN-ia
On a tough end to a tough trip, Belt's breakout, Varsho's leg kick, Bassitt, Berríos, Kikuchi's change, Manoah's slider, Bo's boner, Gausman's gem, the road ahead, and more!
The Blue Jays are headed home. After starting the season with ten games over eleven days on the road, then starting the month of May with nine games in ten days on the road, the 21-16 club will return to Toronto for ten straight home dates beginning on Friday.
A quick and thoroughly dispiriting two-game sweep at the hands of the Phillies concluded the most recent trip on Wednesday, with the team having managed just three wins to six losses. It also took them to 25 road games on the season versus just 12 at home so far.
A return to the Rogers Centre will be a welcome one, at least for a day. The Jays don't play on Thursday, but will welcome a very tough Atlanta team starting on Friday, with the Yankees and Orioles coming in for a visit after that.
It's a tough stretch upcoming, in other words. And the Jays didn't exactly pass their most recent tests with flying colours.
Yet, it wasn't simply a case of the team playing awfully against the Red Sox last week, the Phillies this week, and then playing well against the Pirates in between. That was only, you know, mostly the case.
So let's talk about it! Here's... uh... Weekend-and-Mini-Midweek-Series Up!
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Up: Where the Old Allegheny and the Monongahela Flow
It was only just a week ago that I was openly wondering how long the Blue Jays would give Brandon Belt before deciding that he was washed. Those questions have gotten quieter since then. What a difference a few games can make when you're talking in early May about a part-time player!
Now, granted, Belt's strikeout rate for the season sits at an ugly 42.5%, and remains high at 35% even if we remove his first six awful games of the year from the equation. But there are other numbers he’s produced since then that certainly look more like what the Jays were looking for when they signed him to a one-year, $9.3 million deal during the winter. Heading into Wednesday’s action in Philadelphia, he’d been slashing .294/.379/.471 (140 wRC+) over his last month (58 PA), and his Statcast percentile rankings — and his xwOBA trend lines — had finally begun to look less horrific.
As anyone who was tuning into Sportsnet’s broadcast over the weekend must have heard, Belt has been working on his bat speed. It’s certainly felt that way to watch, but his improvement goes beyond the eye test.
Statcast tells us that five of the 12 batted balls with exit velocities over 100 mph that he's produced this season have come in his five appearances since the start of the Pittsburgh series — including Wednesday’s 103 mph home run off of Zack Wheeler. The 16 plate appearances he's had since then comprise just 18% of his total on the season, while the five 100 mph BIP represent 38% of those. Progress! Seemingly, at least.
Also indicative of progress is the fact that since the start of May he's upped the number of times he's either put a ball in play or fouled one off on a pitch at 95 mph or higher.
I know, I know, crediting someone for a foul ball is not exactly good baseball math, but it's at least a sign that he isn't getting beat as awfully by velocity as he appeared to have been at the start of the year. And, the thing is, Belt doesn't have to be a Vlad or an Alejandro Kirk when it comes to avoiding strikeouts to be effective. In his incredible 2021 season he struck out at a 27% clip. If everything else is working you can live with that.
We obviously can’t yet say that it is, but Belt not actually being washed would be an outstanding development, and we’re at least feeling somewhat better now on that front.
Daulton Varsho was also a notable story on the offensive side of the ball over the weekend — and one also highlighted multiple times on the broadcast. Varsho struck out just three times in 31 plate appearances in the first week of May, while going 11-for-28 with three doubles and three home runs. The spurt appears to have been precipitated by his return to using a leg kick, rather than a toe tap, during his swing load.
Here’s how Arden Zwelling explained it back on Friday:
Varsho went 6-for-15 in Boston, with two homers and a double, and the most noticeable adjustment that he has made is exactly what Joe Siddall was telling you about — he has reincorporated a leg kick that he used earlier in his career. You're going to see it on the right side. Look at how it gets his hands going a bit earlier. That was the problem for Varsho with the toe tap. He felt robotic, he felt like his hands were getting stuck in his swing. Now he feels like he's being much more athletic. He actually got this idea from watching old video of himself as an amateur, when he was at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. This is the type of load that he had back then. When he was slumping in April, guys, he was watching video of his plate appearances in college and said, 'I need to try that again.' Because the problem hasn't been contact for Varsho, it has been the quality of contact. We're seeing much more of that right now.
Joe Siddall added that Varsho “was trying something with that little reaching out with his stride, but it was stagnant. It was like a two-part process. And when you reach out, start, and then stop, now you're kind of stuck in that back side. I think with that leg kick, it's really freed him up. Arden used the word 'athletic,' and I think that's so true. For a hitter to be able to life that leg and then decide to swing when they want, it’s much more fluid.”
So that’s all pretty good! And yet the best part of the Jays’ trip to Pittsburgh was undoubtedly the pitching — starting and otherwise.
On Friday Chris Bassit worked around four walks to give the club seven strong innings, allowing just four hits and picking up five strikeouts. Erik Swanson and Jordan Romano then each pitched a clean frame to lock down a 4-0 win. On Saturday the Jays jumped out to a 4-0 lead after just a single frame, which afforded a relatively smooth ride to José Berríos, who went 6 1/3, allowing just two runs on five hits and a walk while striking out seven. Anthony Bass, Tim Mayza, and Jay Jackson followed, allowing just one walk between them while striking out five. Then, on Sunday, it was Yusei Kikuchi's turn to get back on track, with 6 1/3 innings of his own. He allowed no runs on four hits and two walks, striking out three. Yimi Garcia finished off the seventh for Kikuchi perfectly, but struggled in the eighth to the point where he was replaced by Romano — who would have been asked to get a five-out save had the team not scored five in the top of the ninth.
All told, in 27 innings of work, Jays pitchers allowed just three runs on 17 hits and nine walks. Some notes:
• Bassitt seems to be getting more comfortable with his sinker after going away from it earlier in the season. He threw it 40% of the time to RHB and 17% to LHB in his April 18th start in Houston, whereas in Pittsburgh those rates were 53% and 38%. I'm not sure if that means anything, though. Bassitt is always varying his pitch mix, presumably in part because of what's working for him on any given day, but likely also just to make it harder for opponents to get the book on him. For example, he changed his curveball usage versus RHB over the course of last year from 7% to 14% starting in June. So far this year it's back down. Again, not sure what it means!
• Berríos I continue to not fully understand either. It wasn't many starts ago when his changeup was being touted as one of the keys to his apparent turnaround. Yet in his outing against the Pirates he only threw three to right-handers and continued a downward usage trend against lefties. Hey, whatever works though!
• Kikuchi's run of success, on the other hand, is a lot easier to understand: he's throwing strikes. He's throwing them with his fastball, which has gone from 50% in the zone last year to 57% this year. But, maybe more importantly, he's throwing them with his changeup — a pitch that has become a very different kind of weapon for him this season.
For one thing, in 2019 and 2020, Kikuchi was only throwing his change to RHB 9% of the time. This year he's up to 24%.
But he's not just using it more, he's using it differently.
The best way to illustrate this, I think, is to look at some heatmaps. First up, how he used it in 2022 when behind in the count (left) and when ahead in the count (right).
When behind last year he was barely throwing the pitch. When ahead, he seems to have been largely trying to get batters to chase ones outside of the zone. (Also: pretty erratic!)
Now if we look at 2023, we can immediately see some massive differences. He’s throwing the change a lot more when behind in the count, mostly just humping it in there for strikes — likely, I’d guess, because he’s tunnelling it well with one of his other offerings. He’s also locating it much, much better — perhaps because of some of the changes he worked on in the offseason, or simply because he’s gained a better feel for it due to the increased usage and lack of fear of throwing it in the zone.
Right now the changeup seems deceptive enough to not get hammered, he’s picking up some called strikes with it, and it’s helping with what is easily his most important step forward from last season: the fact that his walk rate has gone from 12.8% to 5.2%.
It’s really encouraging. Or something to watch going forward, at the very least.
Down: Tuesday Night Sicko Club
According to Statcast, the run value on Alek Manoah’s slider this year is tied for the worst in baseball. It has been equivalent to Jack Flaherty’s fastball.
To wit:
That would be the ever-slowing fastball that caused controversy on Tuesday when the Cardinals' 6.18 ERA man told reporters who keep asking about his velocity that they "don't understand the art of pitching." It’s the same fastball that dipped in the third inning on Tuesday into the high-80s. The fastball he threw to the Cubs' Nick Madrigal at 89.9 mph and had smashed for a double. The fastball he threw to Dansby Swanson at 90.2 mph, giving up two-run home run. A fastball that very noticeably used to be very much harder.
Not a pitch you want to have your best offering compared to, in other words.
And yet here we are with the Blue Jays’ opening day starter. Which is to say… uh… here we are:
Now, I'm not making a novel observation when I say that Manoah's slider isn't breaking horizontally as much as it has in previous seasons, as that's been discussed quite a bit among Jays fans who dig into this kind of stuff, I think. But it's certainly quite evident when you drill down into things like movement, location, usage, and all the other basics one first turns to when trying to learn what might be wrong — or right — with a pitcher.
What’s harder sometimes — and I think in this case — is to understand how a thing like that diminished movement impacts something as interconnected as a pitcher’s arsenal. As with Kikuchi, my mind turns to tunnelling.
I’m hardly an expert on this stuff, but I know enough to believe that Manoah’s low-K, weak-contact success relies on his ability to keep hitters guessing until it’s too late for them to put a good swing on the ball.
I also know enough to understand that tunnelling is specifically a phenomenon that occurs from the hitter’s perspective, meaning that those ubiquitous and eye-popping pitch overlays often seen online don’t really show it in a very meaningful way. But with that said, uh… check out these pitch overlays from a year ago!
Anecdotally, we’re not seeing the same kinds of glowing videos about Manoah this season (though Sportsnet’s Caleb Joseph did highlight some good tunnelling of his late last month, after an excellent start against the Yankees offered fleeting hope that Alek had figured something out). We’re also now eight starts into his season, and Manoah has been sub-replacement-level by both fWAR and rWAR so far.
The shape of his slider changing could, on its own, have a major impact on his unusual results. The fact that his spin rate on it has dropped could as well. His ability to repeat his mechanics, his ability to locate, his extension, his release point. Hell, maybe he’s just tipping the old fashioned way. I don’t know. But I know the slider is a problem, and I think Joseph’s probably looking in the right place.
Just look at the difference between how left-handed batters handled his slider last year versus this season.
Lefties appear to be seeing the slider extremely well compared to 2022, as called strikes in the zone and back foot swinging strikes have all but disappeared. No one is being fooled. And it’s hard not to see the .392 on-base LHB have produced against him as related.
But it’s not necessarily just the slider, or just LHB, that’s been a problem. The Phillies swung at 42 of the 94 total pitches Manoah threw on Tuesday night. They swung-and-missed on just three of those. None of those whiffs came on sliders or sinkers. And, in fact, his swing-and-miss rate on the slider has gone from 37% in 2021, to 32% last year, to 24% this year. For the sinker it's gone from 23% to 16% to 10%.
Not great. And, frankly, compared to all this, I think that whatever bullpen blow-ups or bad decisions John Schneider might have made on Tuesday night seem pretty quaint! Let’s, uh, figure this all out, yes?
Down: Untied in Nots
How's tightening up the "little things" going for these Blue Jays? Also not great! At least not in Wednesday’s incredibly frustrating loss. The way I see it there were four small "nots" that led to a defeat here. Let's examine!
Not no. 1: Gausman not covering first
With six innings of three-hit shutout work while striking out nine, walking none, and throwing his five hardest pitches of the day, it was a fabulous outing from Kevin Gausman, save for this one little moment. With two outs in the first Gausman induced a hard grounder off the bat of Bryce Harper that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. — quickly, and weirdly, becoming one of my favourite defensive players ever! — made a diving stop on. And when Vlad righted himself and looked to throw the ball to his pitcher covering first base, Gausman simply wasn’t there.
A Nick Castellanos single put Phillies at first and third. And though Gausman would ultimately get himself out of trouble by striking out Kyle Schwarber, the unnecessary extra hitters added 10 pitches to his total on the day.
Had he been at 89 pitches instead of 99 when the sixth inning ended, he may have come back out for the seventh, which would have saved a better reliever than Tim Mayza for extra innings. Kind of important, it turns out.
(I know, I know, Mayza can hardly be blamed for the loss. He did his job about as well as could have been asked, and probably would have got the 10th with two lefties due up anyway. But maybe everything would have played out differently if Gausman could have gone longer. And, more to the point, oh man, cover first please, Kevin!)
Not no. 2: Espinal not trying for the lead runner
When is doing the smart, safe thing not doing the smart, safe thing? Apparently on Wednesday evening.
Santiago Espinal is usually incredibly surehanded — or so I thought before this season, at least — but played it a little too safe on a Castellano flare up the middle with Harper on first and nobody out in the ninth. Or, at least, he played it theoretically safe. Rather than going the short way and flipping to second to try to — but maybe not! — force the lead runner, Espinal spun and launched a throw to first. Vladdy managed to haul it in, but not without coming off the bag. The only thing safe about the play was the pair of Phillies runners.
Harper would later come around to score the tying run. I think they could have had him.
Not no. 3: Romano not quite being Romano
I was asked in a mail bag a couple weeks ago about whether Jordan Romano is elite, and I maintain that he is. Like, fairly obviously, really.
And yet there is one very important way in which he’s not been quite so elite this season. In 2021, opponents’ wOBA against him with men on base was .224. In 2022 it was .250. Heading into Wednesday’s appearance, for this year it was .321.
Also heading into Wednesday, opponents had slashed .267/.421/.333 against him with RISP so far. And the key hit in this one was, of course, J.T. Realmuto’s RBI double with Harper on second.
I don’t think that makes him less than elite — it’s probably just statistical noise — but if we could just tighten that up real soon it would be super.
Not no. 4: Bo not turning a routine double play
Bo not quietly avoiding misplays
Bo’s defence not being in the spotlight
Bo not just letting his incredible bat do the talking
Bo not being a shortstop1
Oof.
I mean, somebody’s got to lose a great pitchers’ duel. It just obviously sucks that in this one it had to be the Blue Jays. Unfortunately, they only have themselves to blame — and clearly not just because they couldn't muster more than a single run against an outstanding opponent in the form of Wheeler.
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He’s actually been entirely fine!
When Springer's hitting first
And his pants begin to burst
That's diarrhea, diarrhea
When Springer pinch hits
but his pants are filled with shit
That's diarrhea, diarrhea
When Springer's on the bench
And his butthole starts to clench
That's diarrhea, diarrhea
When Springer's in a slump
because he's always taking dumps
That's diarrhea, diarrhea
If Manoah can't find it this year, let's hope that Ryu comes back healthy and effective eh?
One thing that stood out for me in the first Philadelphia game was seeing Varsho and Belt both pinch hit for with the bases loaded by Springer and Jansen. Our two hottest hitters and walk machines replaced with two who are struggling - and one who was sick. Wasn't impressed.